Why I Haven't Blogged In Like Forever

Last Thursday marked our very last OS lecture. It marked the very last day in which we would sit in cold, rigid chairs, trembling and shaking for the duration of 1.5 hours, praying to the heavens: please, please do not call on me to explain that horrendously boring and esoteric section of the paper that I, for the life of me, could not stay awake long enough to read...

Welcome to grad OS. During every Tuesday and Thursday lecture, we'd discuss two landmark papers in the operating systems field. Pro: We got to read *the* original papers that spawned the most fundamental concepts in the field, like multiprogramming systems, virtual memory, monitors & semaphores, UNIX, paging algorithms, file systems -- and even more on revolutionary, but failed ideas that never made it into the undergrad textbooks. Con: By "discuss", I actually mean "grill", as in, the professor would cycle through a stack of notecards with our names on it, asking us to answer technical questions about the assigned readings everytime our names came up. He'd go through the stack of cards multiple times during each lecture, forcing us to learn some rules of...survival ;)

"Time-consuming" doesn't quite cut it. Maybe a description that involved words like "sacrifice" and "soul-devouring" would be more accurate. There were only two lectures per week, but it seemed like every non-OS lecture day was spent in frantic preparation for it, either in the form of writing papers, or reading papers. For example, two papers, each running from 15 to 25 pages long would be a good 6 to 8 hour read. To make this ordeal less painful, we formed study groups and tried decieving our brains into thinking we were having fun by moving our study sessions to happy places -- like cute coffeehouses and fancy thai restaurants. Which would then involve tangent discussions about how we wanted to kill some of the authors for being so egotistical and unnecessarily long-winded, or how we wished we could throw rocks at the boys in our class sometimes for being so obnoxious and pretentious...but I digress.

For someone who dreads talking out loud in lecture, the thought of this class was terrifying at first. At the same time, I'm really glad that I took it (the fact that the class was a requirement is besides the point...). Lectures always continued to be stressful, but it became easier to think in real-time and articulate out loud in front of 30 other classmates as time went on. It's also amazing to look back at the stack of 30 - 40 papers that we have under our belt, and see the friendships that have resulted from attending, like, four study groups per week. This calls for a couple more tallies on the Pro side: (1) we're not scared of reading 27-page OS papers anymore, (2) we know we're all capable of talking out loud in class, (3) we've compiled a pretty entertaining set of quotes/insults that have been hurled between various study group members, and most importantly, (4) I am never reading another OS paper again. Ever.